Plays 1 Read online

  Kwame Kwei-Armah

  Plays: 1

  Elmina’s Kitchen, Fix Up,

  Statement of Regret, Let There Be Love

  Elmina’s Kitchen: ‘This is an angry, provocative, vital play, one that demands change in society while recognising that there are no easy solutions, and is passionately political while understanding that the best way to communicate with people is to keep them entertained.’ Guardian

  Fix Up: ‘What is striking about [Kwei-Armah’s] richly eloquent new play is that it deals with a subject that has specific racial resonances but a wider application: the sacrifice of historical identity to the insatiable demands of brute commerce . . . Kwei-Armah builds a philosophical argument out of a practical problem.’ Guardian

  Statement of Regret: ‘The play is unashamedly political, driven by dialectic, and bravely provocative: it brings sensitive questions from and about the black community in Britain . . . to the stage. It focuses on the continuing legacy of the slave trade and how best to overcome it. It champions debate and celebrates discussion, is honest, quizzical and daring.’ Financial Times

  Let There Be Love: ‘Initially, [the play] looks like an amusing study of racial and generational tolerance, in which a cantankerous old Caribbean Londoner establishes a rapport with his young, Polish cleaner that he can’t find with his two daughters. But it ranges far wider and deeper than that, decisively transcending issues of race. In a series of surprising turns, Let There Be Love delves into domestic violence and illness, as well as gender and sexuality, dignity and death, without ever losing its sense of humour.’ Evening Standard Kwame Kwei-Armah won the Peggy Ramsay award for his first play, Bitter Herb (1998), which was subsequently put on by the Bristol Old Vic, where he also became writer-in-residence. He followed this up with the musical Blues Brother, Soul Sister which toured the UK in 2001. He co-wrote the musical Big Nose (an adaptation of Cyrano) which was performed at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, in 1999. In 2003 the National Theatre produced the critically acclaimed Elmina’s Kitchen for which in 2004 he won the Evening Standard Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright, and was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play 2003. Elmina’s Kitchen has since been produced and aired on Radio 3 and BBC4. His next two plays, Fix Up and Statement of Regret, were produced by the National Theatre in 2004 and 2007. He directed his most recent play, Let There Be Love, when it premiered at the Tricycle Theatre, London, in 2008. He received an honorary doctorate from the Open University in 2008.

  Plays: 1

  Elmina’s Kitchen Fix Up Statement of Regret Let There Be Love

  with an introduction by the author

  KWAME KWEI-ARMAH

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Chronology

  Introduction

  ELMINA’S KITCHEN

  FIX UP

  STATEMENT OF REGRET

  LET THERE BE LOVE

  Imprint

  Kwame Kwei-Armah Chronology

  1998

  Bitter Herb (winner of the Peggy Ramsay Award) premieres at the Bristol Old Vic, directed by Andy Hay.

  1999

  Big Nose, co-authored and directed by Chris Monks, premieres at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry.

  2001

  Blues Brother, Soul Sister is produced by the Bristol Old Vic; national tour directed by Andy Hay.

  2003

  Elmina’s Kitchen premieres at the Cottesloe, National Theatre, directed by Angus Jackson. Wins the Evening Standard Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright, nominated for an Olivier Award and for a BAFTA (Best New Writer). The play was produced as a film for BBC4 Drama (2003) and BBC Radio 3 (2004), and transferred to London’s Garrick Theatre, becoming the first play by an African Caribbean playwright to be produced in the West End.

  2004

  Fix Up premieres at the Cottesloe, National Theatre, directed by Angus Jackson.

  2007

  Statement of Regret premieres at the Cottesloe, National Theatre, directed by Jeremy Herrin.

  2008

  Let There Be Love premieres at the Tricycle Theatre, London, directed by the author, and returns for a second run in the summer of the same year. Television drama Walter’s War is produced by BBC4.

  2009

  Statement of Regret produced by BBC Radio 3.

  Introduction

  While writing a new play I play a game with myself. I pretend that all of the plays I have written to date do not exist. The successes and the failures, the narrative arcs and themes, all must be banished to a place that cannot easily be reached in the vain hope of fooling myself that whatever I am writing at present is not connected to or part of a world I have ever visited before. Of course this is nonsense, for more than anything else I long to connect the dots, to find the link between each play and the circumstances I find myself in mentally or spiritually, but it is something I must do.

  I have just got to the end of a new play (you never get to the end but you know what I mean, right?) and as I write this have no idea whether it will be accepted or not, produced or designated to the bottom drawer forever. But as these few days, the grace period between completion and submission, are the last days of peace I will have until I hear back from the theatre, it is the perfect time for me to speak of the narratives that have brought me to this juncture.

  The existence of these four plays and notably the triptych produced by the National Theatre – Elmina’s Kitchen, Fix Up and Statement of Regret – changed the trajectory of my life. Let There Be Love solidified me in another way, but I shall return to that later.

  Elmina’s Kitchen

  I was driving home one evening to the flat in Hackney where I then lived, when I drove past a gleaming metallic green new BMW wrapped around a lamppost. When I got home I saw on the news that there had been a shooting in Hackney – then dubbed Murder Mile for the number of black-on-black shootings that had occurred over the previous few years. They then cut away to the green BMW and the newscaster reported that two men had been fatally shot: one died immediately, the other who tried to crawl away from the vehicle died later in hospital. It had all the hallmarks of another black-on-black attack. This pained me to my core. I had grown up in a Britain where it was white youths that attacked my community; when I saw another black youth I would nod a kind of acknowledgement, I would feel safer in the knowledge that if I were to be attacked there was someone close by to help me. Now, young blacks were more afraid of being attacked by someone who shared the hue than by an extreme right-wing National Front member, or, slightly later, BNP skinhead.

  It had been ingrained in me as a child by my brilliant mother that whatever occupation I found myself in, serving the greater community through that occupation had to be a goal, an aim. Anything less was selfishness. But how could I serve – discuss this new blight that had taken hold of our young – through my chosen profession, that of the artist? That night before I slept I wrote the first scene of Elmina’s Kitchen. Actually it wasn’t the very first scene that is in the script – as often happens that scene didn’t make the final script – but the idea of writing, of seeking to look beyond headlines to ask fundamental questions of our young men, was born: why were they not trying hard enough to overcome their circumstances, and why was society not trying hard enough to remove the circumstances they had to transcend?

  I handed the script in to Jack Bradley, the then literary manager of the National Theatre, and he in turn handed it to the then new artistic director of the National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner. Nick liked it and programmed it into his first season. It went on to be a huge success. I will never forget the attention this theatrical superstar gave me and how he placed a team of brilliant people around me to help nurture the development of both the script a
nd myself – support he has never stopped giving.

  After the success of Elmina the pressure was on, not from anyone other than myself, to repeat that success, to be not a one-hit wonder but instead create a canon of work that could withstand the vagaries of flavour-of-the-monthism. I was offered lots of screenplays to write about gangs and the like, but, always one to buck against a limiting stereotype, I was determined to not be the chronicler of the underclass, to not be the one who writes about young black males in the pejorative until my day in the sun was gone. I decided to write a triptych of plays chronicling the black British experience as I saw it at the beginning of the ‘noughties’. Whether they were critically successful or not would be secondary to the achievement of having something that my great-grandchildren could read and say, ‘That was my ancestor’s view of the Britain he found at the turn of the century.’

  Fix Up

  My wonderful agent Sean Gascoine had given me a book of African American slave narratives as my opening night present for Elmina. I opened it up one night many months later and the play Fix Up was born. The words of the enslaved were so strong, so potent so personal. Like most people, regardless of whether or not they have degrees, I am mainly self-educated and I gained much of my knowledge from the independent black bookstores that were in existence during what I call the modern Black Renaissance – that time in the nineties when intellectual pursuits were the dominant feature of black youth. This was the time when the greatest hip-hop band of all time, Public Enemy, ruled the airwaves (well, the stations and clubs I used to frequent anyway), when Spike Lee’s movies opened up with a ‘where’s my forty acres and a mule?’, days when the history that had been long hidden from the children of the African diaspora was coming to light and invigorating a generation to aim higher, learn more, teach thyself to know thyself. Now these tremendous community resources – the black bookstores – were dying out, and with them, I believed, the knowledge and wisdom those stores were set up to impart. A community without knowledge of itself, its history, soon self-destructs because the present isn’t big, strong or robust enough to sustain the needs of fully rounded human beings.

  I had written Elmina in the spirit – dialogue-wise at least – of David Mamet: hard, fast, corrupt. I decided that I wanted to create a more lyrical prose, one that could hold the magic that I felt when I read the first page of the slave narratives; one that I felt when I saw the plays of my ‘wrighting’ role model August Wilson. Its journey to the stage was not an easy one. I rewrote and rewrote, and threw out and discarded so many times, and it was only the foresight of Nicholas Hytner and the tenacity of my director Angus Jackson and dramaturg Nick Drake that saved me from completely destroying my original vision. I learnt more lessons during that process than from the rest of my career put together. And although the least performed of my plays thus far, it is still one of my favourites because it spoke to me of many things. It was my attempt to not be contained, to not allow myself to be something I was not; it was my attempt to give voice to the generation that was almost voiceless, save for the poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson – the generation of those now in their fifties who came over to Britain as children with their parents from the Caribbean; the generation that walked the streets of London when it was cold; the ones who existed before we discovered the disgracefully high level of discrimination in the police force and schools and everyday life. How they survived, mentally and spiritually, was a story I wanted to tell, that I continually want to tell. I also wanted to look at the issues of being ‘mixed raced’ or ‘bicultural’ in a world that divides itself often into straight black and white. Fix Up would be the last new play of mine that my mother would see, and at the end of the final performance she thanked me for telling that story. That of itself was worth more than every prize in the world. It was every prize in the world.

  Statement of Regret

  I then attempted part three of the triptych. It was to be set in the church and be a thumping big gospel musical. I wrote three different versions and none of them worked. Then I opened the black newspaper, The New Nation, one morning during late 2006 to see the headline, Tony Blair’s ‘STATEMENT OF REGRET’ over the British involvement in the slave trade. The fact that Britain was the slave trade until it decided to be the trade’s policeman hit me hard. That the word ‘sorry’ could not be said hit me even harder. For the first time in my life I had a title before the play.

  I decided to set the play in the world of a black think tank. I wanted to explore the themes of reparation for the slave trade – not for slavery itself, but for the deculturalisation of the African Caribbean, the process, to paraphrase a speech in the play, whereby the African had his language, religion and culture taken from him/her to make them beasts of burden. A process that would lead to generations of Africans – no, African Caribbeans – not knowing where they originated from or what their original language might have been. For centuries a people had been made almost cultureless. I didn’t want it to be blacks shouting at whites, ‘Look what you’ve done to me!’ That’s boring. So to highlight the deculturalisation I placed the argument between two ‘black peoples’: one of direct African descent, the other Afro-Caribbean. I wanted to look at ‘grief’: grief for the loss of a culture, grief for the loss of family, grief for the pains of living second-class lives in first-world settings. Could one be reparated for that? I have since adapted the play for radio – ‘Obama-ed’ it some might say – so there are two endings: one that was staged at the National, the other for BBC Radio 3. I’m happy with them both.

  Let There Be Love

  Let There Be Love is the first play of my own that I directed, and is quite frankly my tribute to my mother. Like most of the middle classes in London mid-noughties, your builder or cleaner, or both, were Polish. Actually they could have been from anywhere in Eastern Europe, but just as every West Indian was Jamaican when I was growing up, every Eastern European person was Polish. I found myself becoming almost like a teacher of Britishness for them. My builder especially would ask me how to pay this and that bill – and more importantly when to pay it – and what the wording on certain letters, or comments he would receive from customers, meant. I would hear them both speak of only planning to be in Britain for five years and then they’d return home to Poland as ‘kings’ – a direct repeat of what I would hear my West Indian elders say when I was a child. Ironically, though, I began to hear those same people speak despairingly of the new immigrants, in almost exactly the same way we were spoken of as West Indians. When I sat down to write the play, what came out more than anything for me was my desire to record how quickly we forget: how the impulse to feel threatened by the next group to arrive in society overrode memories of the discrimination and pain we had ourselves suffered. Although all the above scared me, I also wanted to write about how much warmer, how much easier, the country had become for immigrants, mostly due to the battles my parents’ generation – the Windrush pioneer generation – had fought and won.

  I had received some pretty scathing reviews in some quarters for Statement of Regret. Coming directly after that, Let There Be Love was a type of healing for me, not in terms of the way it was reviewed (as I don’t read reviews of my own plays or those of playwrights I know), but simply because it was there so that I could get back in the saddle immediately. It was there to help me remember why I write.

  I strive to make the plays I write as good as possible because only then can the subjects I wish to raise people’s consciousness of, only then can the thing that ultimately changes people, truly start its process. I write to be catalyst for a debate.

  I hope you enjoy the plays. More importantly, I hope you talk, fight and argue about them.

  Kwame Kwei-Armah

  May 2009

  Elmina’s Kitchen

  Elmina’s Kitchen was first presented in the Cottesloe auditorium of the National Theatre, London, on 29 May 2003. The cast was as follows:

  Digger

  Shaun Parkes

  Del
i

  Paterson Joseph

  Anastasia

  Dona Croll

  Ashley

  Emmanuel Idowu

  Baygee

  Oscar James

  Clifton

  George Harris

  Director Angus Jackson

  Designer Bunny Christie

  Lighting designer Hartley T.A. Kemp

  Music Neil McArthur

  Sound designer Neil Alexander

  Company voice work Patsy Rodenburg

  Dialect coach Claudette Williams

  Musicians Steve Russell, Juldeh Camaram, Atongo Zimba

  Original songs Kwame Kwei-Armah, Neil McArthur, George Harris, Oscar James

  Characters

  Digger

  Deli

  Anastasia

  Ashley, Deli’s son

  Baygee

  Clifton

  Act One

  Prologue

  The stage is in darkness. A single spotlight slowly reveals a costumed man, standing absolutely still with a gurkel (a one-string African guitar famed for possessing the power to draw out spirits) in his hands. His head moves sharply as if smelling something distasteful. The music starts. It is a slow lament-sounding concoction of American blues and traditional African music.

  The man then covers the length and breadth of the stage flicking handfuls of powder on to the playing area. The music ends.

  Blackout.

  Scene One

  It’s Tuesday, mid-afternoon. It’s raining. We are in Elmina’s Kitchen, a one-notch-above-tacky West Indian takeaway restaurant in ‘Murder Mile’ Hackney. The walls are littered with ‘Dance Hall’ advertisements and Whey and Nephew-type posters. Amid the Budweiser series of posters celebrating African-American heroes there is a big sign saying ‘NO DRUGS ARE PERMITTED ON THESE PREMISES. RESPECT.’ The TV that is attached to the left wall closest to the counter is blaring out the ragga tune ‘Sufferer’ by Bounty Killer. To the right is a rack of spirits. There is a telephone on the counter. Behind the counter are two wooden swing doors that lead to the kitchen. Above that is a huge picture of a middle-aged West Indian woman, Elmina, Deli’s mother. Next to that is a framed laminated poster that reads, ‘Life is beauty, admire it. Life is costly, care for it. Life is wealth, keep it. Life is love, enjoy it. Life is a dream, realise it. Life is a challenge, meet it. Life is a duty, serve it. Life is a game, play it. Life is a mystery, know it. Life is an opportunity, benefit from it. Life is a promise, fulfil it.’